Afternoon, folks! Hope you all had a nice holiday weekend with family and friends. Sarah and I spent our Thanksgiving in New Orleans with family and it was pretty swell. I ate way too much good food (NoLA is like that). If I lived there, I’d have to run about 12 miles a day just to work off the calories from everything I wanted to eat: Crawfish étouffée, jambalaya, gumbo, po-boys, tartine, beignets and cafe au lait… MMmmmmmm. They do know how to cook down there.

In announcement news today, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has set Paul Greengrass’ Captain Phillips for Blu-ray Combo and DVD release on 1/21 (SRP $40.99 and $30.99). Extras will include audio commentary with Greengrass and 3 Capturing Captain Phillips featurettes (Embarkation, Full Ahead and Stand Fast).

Meanwhile, Lionsgate has set the new Robert Redford deep sea survival film All Is Lost for release on Blu-ray and DVD on 2/11.

Walt Disney Home Entertainment is gearing up to release The Fifth Estate on Blu-ray and DVD on 1/28 – watch for an official announcement later this month. Disney has also set Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo for release on Blu-ray on 3/11.

Warner and HBO have officially announced the release of Veep: The Complete Second Season on Blu-ray and DVD on 3/25. Extras will include audio commentaries, deleted scenes and a “making of” featurette.

And Universal has set a repackaging of Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Epic Series for DVD on 2/18. This is the original classic series from the 1970s.

Finally, we should take a moment today to acknowledge the passing of actor Paul Walker on Saturday, best known for his role in the popular Fast & Furious film franchise. There’s no shortage of commentary on the obvious irony surrounding this tragedy today, so I’d rather focus instead on the fact that, from most reports, Walker was a truly decent human being – the rare Hollywood celebrity who seldom acted like one. He was apparently a big animal rescue advocate, which would make him okay in my book all by itself. There’s a story that, while in a Santa Barbara jewelry store, Walker noticed an Iraq war vet and his fiancé shopping for her wedding ring, so he put the ring on his own tab for them. And Walker died shortly after hosting his own charity event supporting the victims of Typhoon Haiyan. That sounds like pretty good guy in our book, so we doff our caps here at The Bits in his memory today. More via the L.A. Times.

We’ll leave you today with a look at the Blu-ray cover artwork for Sony’s Captain Phillips, Disney’s The Fifth Estate, Lionsgate’s All Is Lost, Warner’s Best of Bogart Collection (due 3/25) and both versions of Sony’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (due 1/28). All are now available for pre-order from Amazon.com by clicking on the cover images…

About Bill Hunt

Bill Hunt is the Editor in Chief of The Digital Bits, which he founded in the early days of the DVD format in 1997 to bring together the Hollywood film community and movie fans from around the world. His columns…